The Long Game

by Mitch McConnell

  I was born two years later, in 1942, at Colbert County Hospital, about forty miles from Athens, Alabama. In another two years, my dad left for the war. He was exempt from fighting on two accounts: having a child, and his job as a civilian employee for the army at Huntsville Arsenal. But like so many men of his generation, he felt a duty to participate. He was an able-bodied man, and a citizen who deeply loved his country. The idea that he had taken the out offered to him, while millions of others wore the uniform—and many he knew had been killed—ate away at him. He wouldn’t ignore that nagging for long. Just after I turned two years old in 1944, he enlisted in the army at the age of twenty-six.

  On top of having to care for a baby sick with polio, my mother also had to deal with my father’s absence, and her fear he wouldn’t survive the war. Every day she’d check for one of his letters, in which he’d write of the things he was allowed to share: about the ham and eggs he ate at midnight in a German home, his first home-cooked meal in a long time; the wool underwear that didn’t keep him warm enough; the flowers on people’s lawns that made him miss spending time tinkering in my grandparents’ backyard. What he didn’t write about was the experience of being “in the thick of it,” as he later described it, like the night his company lost two-thirds of its men.

  It was only much later, after I became a husband and father myself, that I could appreciate what this time must have been like for my mother, how vast her worry for both my dad and me. There are simply no words to describe how grateful I am for her commitment to our family, and to me. Without it, I never would have had the experience that remains not only my first vivid memory, but one of the most significant moments of my life: stopping at a shoe store in LaGrange, Georgia, on the way out of Warm Springs, where she bought me my very first walking shoes—a pair of low-top saddle oxfords. The nurses had just told my mother that our two years of hard work had paid off and we’d won the fight. I could walk. Without a brace, without even a limp. We had beaten polio, and because of my mother’s tenacity and patience, I was given the promise of a happy, normal childhood.

  Which, for the most part, it was. On May 8, 1945, my father wrote a letter to my mom, and for the first time since he’d left for the war, he was able to say where he was: Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. It was VE Day, and the war in Europe was over. “I’m in a large city,” he wrote, “and the people have literally gone wild. When we went through the towns coming here, every man, woman and child lined the streets, waving flags, throwing flowers, giving us cognac, wine, cake, cookies, etc. And kissing us and shaking hands with us. It has not been easy here until today but now we are the victors.”

  He boarded the USS Monticello in Le Havre, France, on July 13, 1945, and made it home a little over a week later. We were all extraordinarily relieved he was back, unscathed other than a nick on his chin where he’d been hit by shrapnel. He was then issued jungle gear, and given orders to head to the Pacific. But to the substantial relief of our family, President Truman dropped the A-bomb on Japan. Knowing the potential suffering this saved my dad, and the great number of lives spared by bringing an end to the war, there’s never been any second thoughts in our family about the wisdom of that decision.

  I was too young at the time to know the pride I’d later feel about my dad’s service in Europe, or to fully appreciate his bravery. He didn’t offer a lot about his experience, although he would later tell me he’d been a scout, meaning he walked ahead of his squad as it advanced. What a dangerous and courageous thing to do. As time passed and I got older, I noticed subtle ways in which the war had impacted him. Where he once enjoyed hunting a great deal, he took me squirrel hunting just once after returning home from the war. As we roamed the field together in the early dawn of a perfect spring day, just like so many southern fathers and sons before us, my father put his rifle to his side and said we were going home.

  “I think I’m done with shooting anything for a while,” he said. He never hunted again, and nor would I.

  My mom and I both grew very close to my dad’s parents, Big Dad and Mamie. They owned a funeral parlor in Athens and Big Dad’s real name was Robert Hayes McConnell. He was born in 1877, a month before Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as the nineteenth president. The 1876 race between Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden had been exceptionally close. Tilden had won the popular vote by a small majority, and after some ballot counts were disputed, Congress created an electoral commission to decide the election. The haggling began, and a deal was eventually cut between the Hayes forces and the electors in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida: they would give Hayes their votes, and thus the presidency, if he ended Reconstruction. Hayes kept his word and shortly after taking office, he withdrew federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina, bringing an end to the era of Reconstruction. I’m sure that my grandfather was given his middle name after the president. It surely couldn’t be a coincidence that he was born February 23, 1877, and Hayes was sworn in ten days later, especially since this name doesn’t appear to have been used at any time in our family history. And nearly a hundred years after Big Dad’s birth, I would pass the same middle name on to my firstborn daughter.

  Having lost her own mother as an infant, my mom came to think of Mamie as her own, and I don’t think there could have been two people that either of us loved any more. I’d spend every Friday night sleeping in the spare bedroom in their big yellow house with the wide porch at 201 East Bryan Street, waking up the next morning to meet my friends at the picture show, as we called it then. My dad would give me fifteen cents—ten for admission and five for popcorn. The main attraction was usually a Roy Rogers or Gene Autry cowboy movie, but it was the short serial they’d play following the movie that I liked best. The hero would be left hanging from a cliff by his fingernails, forcing me to wait an entire week to see what happened. On the weekends, I’d join the other kids in my neighborhood for a game of cowboys and Indians or, more frequently, Civil War. Of course, in the South of the early 1950s, it was nearly impossible to find a single boy—many who, like me, had great-grandparents who fought under Robert E. Lee, whose grandmothers belonged to the United Daughters of the Confederacy—willing to be a Yankee. At night, I’d join my parents in front of the radio to listen to The Shadow, Amos ’n’ Andy, and Jack Benny.

  It was a simple but happy childhood. As their only child, I never wanted for my parents’ attention, and while they were never too strict or severe, there was no question that when offered the choice, I must always choose right over wrong. They taught me, both in what they said and in how they lived their lives, about personal responsibility and hard work, and it was here in Athens that I learned many lessons that would serve me well throughout my life. Like, for instance, how to stand up to a bully. His name was Dicky McGrew, and he lived across the street from us. His dad owned the local newspaper, and Dicky was as big as he was bossy. I was thoroughly intimidated. He had an annoying tendency to push me around while we played together, and sometimes I’d notice my dad silently watching from our lawn. But he didn’t remain silent for long. One afternoon, my father stopped his yard work and called me home from Dicky’s.

  “Son, I’ve been watching the way you interact with him,” he said. “That’s got to change, and it’s got to change right now.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “That kid’s been pushing you around for too long. You’re going back across that street, and you’re going to beat up Dicky McGrew.”

  I felt my stomach drop. “Dad,” I protested, “he’s bigger than I am. And older.”

  “Well, I’m bigger and older than you too,” my dad responded. “And I’ve had enough of this. It’s time you showed him who’s boss. Now go.”

  There I was: torn between my father and Dicky McGrew. Not being a foolish child, I decided I had a far better (if still highly unlikely) chance at winning a fight with Dicky than I did with my father. Steeling myself, I crossed the street, approached Dicky, and started sw
inging. I don’t know if it was because my punches were on point or Dicky was too startled to defend himself, but I won the fight. I even bent his glasses. From that moment forward, Dicky never bullied me again.

  This experience made a lasting impression on me, teaching me a few lessons I’d return to again and again throughout my life: standing up for myself, knowing there’s a point beyond which I can’t be pushed, and being tough when it’s important to be tough. In the line of work I would choose, compromise is key, but I’d come to find that certain times required me to invoke the fighting spirit both my parents instilled in me. Every time I’ve had to be tough, I’ve gotten a lot of criticism, but it’s almost always worked, just like bending Dicky McGrew’s glasses.

  CHAPTER TWO

  From Baseball to Politics

  I got my first baseball glove the summer of 1954, when I was twelve years old. My father and I split the cost of it, with my share coming from money I’d earned cutting my neighbors’ lawns in Augusta, Georgia, where, four years earlier, my family had moved. My father had continued to work with the army after his discharge from the military, and in 1950, just after I turned eight, he was transferred to Camp Gordon, now Fort Gordon, in Augusta. It was not easy to leave Athens, Alabama, having to say good-bye to Big Dad and Mamie, but as we settled into life in Georgia, we all tried to make the best of it. For me, this meant finding baseball.

  I’m not sure what, exactly, drew me so strongly to the sport. Maybe it was my way of trying to find someplace to feel at home at a time I otherwise felt so uprooted. Or that even by the age of twelve, I had come to realize that I’d never truly gain the respect of my peers if I didn’t excel in something athletic. Or that the polio, which left me unable to run for long distances, narrowed my choices.

  It was probably a mix of all those things, but either way, I loved the game. So did my father. The summer of 1955, he took me to see the Augusta Tigers, a Detroit Tigers farm team, no less than thirty-five times. We’d sit in the bleachers, filling up on hot dogs and popcorn, and then race home. Before the screen door even slammed shut behind us, we’d be in front of the radio, turning the dial to the Brooklyn Dodgers game. The Dodgers were my team, and 1955 was their year. It was the fifth time in nine years they’d gone up against the Yankees in the World Series. They’d lost every time, but I believed their day had come. The Yankees won the first two games but the Dodgers came back. The series was tied at 3–3. Just before the seventh and final game, my family and I traveled back to Athens, Alabama, to attend the funeral of my great-uncle Ad. While everyone gathered somberly in the kitchen, I was in the living room, trying to pick up the game on the radio. I had to press my ear against the speaker and constantly jiggle the dial to try to hear the game over the static, wishing the whole time I were at home watching on TV, listening to the commentary offered by Vin Scully, the famous voice of the Dodgers. In one of the final plays, Yogi Berra hit a line drive to Sandy Amoros in left field. Amoros threw it to Pee Wee Reese on second for an out, and then Reese to Gil Hodges at first, for a double play. This would be the play that decided the game, which ended 2–0 Dodgers, handing them the series for the first time in the franchise’s history. Trying to respect the mourning adults in the next room, I jumped up and down as quietly as I could.

  This was all well and good, but when it came to my own attempt at the sport, I had a serious problem. I was terrible at baseball. I picked up a bat to find I couldn’t hit; nor could I throw particularly well. It was a dampening realization, to say the least, but I also knew I had a choice: I could accept my limitations and move on, or I could work hard to overcome them. I chose the latter, and the summer I turned twelve—a summer that saw Hank Aaron hit his first home run, the polio vaccine get introduced in the United States, and the Supreme Court pass down the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision—I approached my goal of getting good at baseball as if it were the most important task in the world.

  Our house at the time—2311 Neal Street—was the first home my parents owned, after almost ten years of marriage, and I bet they didn’t pay any more than $8,000 for it. It was a modest house, made more modest by the telephone pole that, for some reason, had been erected right smack in the middle of our front lawn. It was a little embarrassing. My parents looked into having it removed, but were told it would cost more than they’d paid for the house. (The telephone pole would remain.) One of the best things about this house is that we were just two doors down from the home of Bernie Ward, the principal at my elementary school. Before he became our principal, Bernie played professional baseball in the minor leagues, and he certainly knew a lot about the game. Often, when he saw me practicing with my friends in our backyard, he’d stop by to offer some instruction—showing me how to grip the ball to get a more accurate pitch; how to throw a curveball. We worked on my batting and fielding, and after he’d gone home, I’d convince the other kids to stick around, to practice with me a little longer.

  To my amazement, the effort paid off. I started hitting the ball well. My pitches were good. It seemed to happen suddenly, as if something had clicked. By the end of the summer, I’d found that with nothing other than persistence and hard work, I had turned myself from a crummy ballplayer into a pretty darn good one.

  It was extremely gratifying, and by the time I was thirteen, playing in the local Little League, I was feeling very confident in my baseball abilities. I was no longer just a student of the sport; I was now a serious competitor. In fact, I’d say I was even feeling a little full of myself. Maybe I had a future in the sport, I thought. Maybe I was going to even play in the big leagues. And then the all-star game came along and with it another important life lesson.

  At the end of the summer, I was chosen as a county all-star, which meant I got to play in the exhibition game against the city all-stars. All season I’d hoped for the chance to play in this game, and had been looking forward to it for weeks. But that excitement gave way to fear the moment we arrived at their field.

  They were bigger than we were. They had better uniforms. Their field was nothing like the dusty, pebbled patch behind Wheeless Road Elementary where we played, but an actual baseball field with freshly cut grass, a pitcher’s mound, and a home-run fence.

  The game was seven innings, and the other pitcher on my team was slated to pitch the first three and a half innings, and I’d pitch the last. This gave me plenty of time to sit on that hard wooden bench, gripping my glove and realizing how overmatched we were. Come the fourth inning, I made my way to the mound on shaky legs, praying my nerves wouldn’t show themselves in my pitches. I wasn’t so lucky.

  I walked the first guy. And then the second. And then the third and the fourth. That was one run in. As the next batter approached the plate, I reminded myself of how hard I’d worked, how good I was, how I had every reason to be confident. I was going to get that ball in the strike zone, the way I had hundreds of other times.

  Well, I did, only to watch the batter knock it over the fence and out of the park. Needless to say, we lost the game. Afterward, my dad knew enough to allow me the car ride home in silence. I kept my head pressed against the glass so my dad couldn’t see my disappointment, and knew I’d just learned another important lesson. As soon as you start to believe there’s nobody smarter or stronger or better than you, you will undoubtedly come up against the kid who’s going to clear the bases with a home run, knocking the ball far over the fence, and taking your overconfidence right along with it.

  Just as I was finally growing accustomed to life in Augusta, Georgia, my dad came home with an unexpected announcement: we were moving to Louisville, Kentucky. Three years earlier, he’d left his job with the army to work for the DuPont company, which was building the Savannah River nuclear plant in Aiken, South Carolina, right across the Savannah River. The company had offered him a promotion in Kentucky. It was a step up, with a higher salary, and he couldn’t turn it down. Before I even had the chance to protest, we were once aga
in packing our things into boxes, and loading Button and Cookie, our two Boston bulldogs, into our 1956 Chevy for the eight-hour drive north. We arrived in January of 1956. Big Dad was concerned about our move. Not because it brought us even farther from Mamie and him in Athens, but because in his view, as a man who felt a lot of pride and patriotism to have spent his whole life in the Deep South, moving as far north as Kentucky meant moving to Yankee territory.

  We rented a small house in a middle-class neighborhood in the southern end of Louisville. Having to uproot our lives for the second time in six years was hard on my mother. She missed Big Dad and Mamie, and with her roots in rural Alabama, Louisville felt too urban and unfriendly. It was hard on me as well. I was halfway through the eighth grade, preparing to enter high school. The idea of starting over in a wholly unfamiliar place made this already daunting transition feel even more so. I enrolled at duPont Manual High School, housed in an ornate Gothic building across from the University of Louisville. The only thing that excited me about this new school was that it was the alma mater of Louisvillian Pee Wee Reese, a member of my beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, who had captained the team to its 1955 World Series victory.